We, the home group members, believe it helps when we use the NA language of recovery in all that we say in this meeting. That is; we prefer to refer to our disease as addiction and identify ourselves as addicts. We refer to our time in the NA program as clean time or recovery. We do this because with the first step of NA we have shifted the focus off any specific drug and onto the recovery process leaving us with the single focus necessary for unity.
Any labels which imply specific drugs or more than one disease dilutes that focus and some of the unity called for in NA’s first tradition is lost. This is not something we enforce; we are just letting you know what seems to work for us.
From reading this clarity statement if you will, I can see how this discussion came about. Being from an Area that has just recently gained some maturity, We have used so called clarity statements to help the new commer and old timer to try to understand that you are welcome here no matter what, but please try to have respect for our facilities and others desires to learn. It was a clarity statement that simply said whats said here stays here at my second meeting that gave me a breif moment of clarity to what anonymity simply meant. We should not claim this is how we would like you to behave here, just some simplicity without elaboration of some of the basic principles of recovery.